Has house building ‘fallen off a cliff’?

Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on 22 September at the start of the Labour party conference, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said that “house building has basically fallen off a cliff”.

It’s not clear exactly which of the many ways of measuring “house building” Ms Rayner was referring to—we’ve asked Ms Rayner and the Labour party and haven’t had any response. 

Some measures do show a marked recent fall, but we have various different bits of data covering different time periods, and the figures need context. For example, a 41% year-on-year fall in the number of new homes started in England in the first quarter of this year may partly reflect a peak last year linked to new regulatory standards. 

Housing is devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so the UK government is only responsible for housing in England and that’s what we’ve focused on in this fact check.

What does the data show?

One of the main measures to look at is the number of “net additional dwellings”. It’s important to note these figures don’t strictly relate to “house building”—they show the number of newly built houses or properties converted into homes, minus those demolished or converted into non-residential buildings. But the government describes this set of data as “the primary and most comprehensive measure of total housing supply”. 

The number of net additional dwellings in England fell between 2008 and 2013 but subsequently climbed, peaking in 2020 before falling during the pandemic. The government says this “may be due, in part, to the restrictions introduced during Spring 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic”. Numbers recovered during 2022 and 2023 but have not yet returned to the pre-pandemic level. 

This means that, except for in one pandemic year, the number of net additional dwellings has increased every year since 2013. But there is a time lag on this data set—the most recent figures we have are for the 2022-23 financial year, so they can’t tell us what’s happened in the last year and a bit.

Another set of statistics used to measure the number of new homes is called “indicators of new supply”. These are more up-to-date—they are published by the government on a quarterly basis for England, and show both the number of new homes being started and the number of new homes being completed.Provisional figures on this measure show a large spike in houses started in 2023 followed by a significant fall so far in 2024—they were 41% lower during the first quarter of 2024 than a year earlier. The House of Commons Library has said this is likely due to “house builders bringing forward the start of projects to avoid the costs of complying with new building regulatory standards”.

Ms Rayner may have been referring to the latest statistics for the number of successful planning applications for residential housing projects in England. In the year ending June 2024, authorities granted around 31,600 such applications, down 8% from the previous year.  Looking just at the data for April to June this year it was at the lowest level since 1979.  

It is also possible that Ms Rayner was referring to the number of houses required, rather than the number actually being built. 

As we’ve noted before, the previous government pledged in 2019 to build 300,000 new homes in England each year by the mid-2020s, and a million more homes by the end of the parliament. While the supply of new homes reached a high of 248,590 in 2019/20, the government used existing data to estimate that over one million homes were built between December 2019 and May 2024. (This figure may change as the data continues to be updated.)

Labour says its goal is to build 1.5 million homes in England across the next five years, the equivalent of 300,000 a year on average.

However, one 2019 report for the National Housing Federation and Crisis estimated around 340,000 new homes need to be supplied in England each year, while Financial Times analysis from earlier this year estimated the number of new homes needed would be 421,000 a year, or even as high as 529,000 per year if current net migration levels hold.